The End
Those of you who have found my Tolkien posts an irritating imposition on your Facebook feeds can breathe a little easier now -- and, conversely, those few of you who’ve actually enjoyed reading my long rambles about The Lord of the Rings will, I imagine, feel a strange absence now that I’ve reached the end of the journey. I know I will. When I began this journey, I had it in mind that perhaps Frodo and I would end difficult journeys at about the same time -- that by now my country might be slowly emerging from the apocalyptic landscape of the pandemic, and that I’d feel an extra lift as a result. But the hearts of Men are weak and easily corrupted, it seems, and it doesn’t take a magic ring for a man in power to find himself more excited about his dominion over others than about the opportunity to guard and serve them. Anyway, I’ve been grateful for this little emotional life raft for the last couple of months, and I’m sorry to see it go.
It’s been a pleasant surprise to find that some of you enjoy the deep dives I’ve been making into Tolkien’s biography and the bits and pieces of his lore, etc., and so I wanted to share a long list of some interesting books and resources that I’ve read over the years, since I think you might find them interesting also.
I know some of these suggestions will be old hat to some of you, but I wanted to encourage folks to start wherever they’re at -- The Silmarillion is really ground zero if you want to dive into Tolkien’s lore. https://bookshop.org/books/the-silmarillion-9780345325815/9780345325815 It’s an attempt by Tolkien’s son, Christopher (with the help of a very young Guy Gavriel Kay, who’s now a noted author in his own right) to take the hodge-podge of Tolkien’s notes about the lore and history of Middle-earth and turn them into a kind of story. The book’s older than me, and so there are places where it’s missing some material that Chris Tolkien unearthed over the subsequent decades, but in general it’s considered THE starting point to learn about Tolkien’s world, once you’ve read his novels. Now, unless you love creation myths and old-fashioned Old Testament prose, you’re better off not starting at the very beginning and trying to read it straight through -- the Bible really is a good analogy here, since this is a collection of books and stories running over a long time, and the style of storytelling varies. Dive in for a particular story, especially if something in the Appendices at the end of Return of the King caught your eye -- Feanor and the Silmarils makes a good couple of chapters, or you could dig into the story of Beren and Luthien that Aragorn talks about, or Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin if you want some fun Glorfindel adventures. The Silmarillion isn’t super detailed -- you feel more like you’re getting glimpses of a larger world -- and so it’s best to read with a really lively and open mind, filling in the gaps with your own imagination.
Sometimes I refer to The Silmarillion, but truthfully when I’m trying to remember something, the easiest place to start is often the Web -- there are a number of good Tolkien sites out there, but my go-to spot is Tolkien Gateway: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Main_Page This will be no surprise to you, since the images that have accompanied nearly every post I’ve made have all been from the Gateway -- their depth of coverage is very good, their citations are generally precise, and their coverage of both professional and fan art renderings of scenes and characters from Tolkien is really top notch. If you’re curious about a character or two, but aren’t sure you’ve got time to dive into The Silmarillion, look that character up in the Gateway and see what you learn.
The entire History of Middle-earth series is basically like The Silmarillion, but if Christopher Tolkien kept stopping to give you some context for where these bits and pieces came from, or what we think his dad was up to in writing them. I love them, but again, it’s not like reading a novel. The very best of them, in my opinion, is The Return of the Shadow, Volume 6, in which Christopher tries to show us, in draft chapter after draft chapter, how his father went from trying to write a sequel to The Hobbit in which Bilbo gets married or something like that, into writing the epic fantasy novel we know and love: https://bookshop.org/books/the-return-of-the-shadow-volume-6/9780618083572 The drafts themselves are great, and watching the characters emerge and evolve is fascinating. The Return of the Shadow gets you from Bag End into about Moria, and has by far the most eye-opening insights into Tolkien’s create process (though Volumes 7-9 are all still focused on the writing of The Lord of the Rings, and I’ve read and loved them all). Other volumes in this series might give you more information about places and people you’ve seen mentioned in The Lord of the Rings, too, so I’d recommend giving any of them a look.
Humphrey Carpenter was really deeply invested in telling the stories of the group of writer friends in Oxford around World War II, who called themselves “The Inklings”, at least for a while, as they gathered and shared their work. Carpenter’s work is pretty old by now, but he had the advantage of actually knowing Tolkien personally -- his book entitled The Inklings is a good read, and his biography of Tolkien is a very good starting place if you want to know more about the man. Personally, though, I think I love his edited Letters collection best: https://bookshop.org/books/the-letters-of-j-r-r-tolkien/9780618056996 Carpenter selects a great cross-section, which fills you in a bit on Tolkien’s life and his friendships, but which also has a ton of great letters he writes to friends and to other authors and to fans, answering questions about his novels and filling in the gaps. His comments are often revealing and sometimes surprising, and since it’s just a collection of letters, it’s very easy to skim or to dip in and out of, if you like.
Tolkien’s interest in the world he had created was, first and foremost, an interest in language and in linguistics. If that’s interesting to you -- and I do recommend it for the truly obsessed -- you ought to dive into learning a little bit about how to speak one of the languages of Middle-earth. The most deeply developed of these languages is Quenya, a sort of “High Elven” that was more ceremonial than conversational by the point of the War of the Ring, but which appears in some songs and formal speeches even at that time. I studied Quenya for a linguistics course in college, and enjoyed it -- this online course is great, though its introduction is telling the truth when it says that it’s more for a serious student than it is for someone who just wants to learn how to say hello and goodbye and I love you (inye tye-mela, by the way) in Quenya. https://folk.uib.no/hnohf/qcourse.htm I’d also recommend having a look at Ruth Noel’s book -- some elements in that book have been superseded by later publications of Christopher Tolkien’s, as he unearthed more of his father’s notes and made sense of them, but it’s probably the closest we’ve got (or will get) to a sort of Middle-earth phrasebook for the traveler: https://bookshop.org/books/the-languages-of-tolkien-s-middle-earth-a-complete-guide-to-all-fourteen-of-the-languages-tolkien-invented/9780395291306 Noel’s book does have the advantage of taking in languages beyond Quenya, so if you’re really more interested in Dwarvish or the Black Speech of Mordor, etc., this is for you.
There’s a lot of scholarly writing out there about Tolkien -- I’ve read some of it but certainly not all of it. Probably the biggest name in Tolkien scholarship (who’s writing for a popular audience) is Tom Shippey, who’s been hired now as the consultant for Amazon’s big Prime series set in Numenor (we think). Shippey’s most well-known book on Tolkien is Author of the Century -- https://bookshop.org/books/j-r-r-tolkien-author-of-the-century/9780618257591 -- though he’s written other things as well. I’d read that if you’re curious about Tolkien’s impact on literature and to see an argument about why he’s so popular and what's enduring about his work. Another very influential name right now is John Garth, whose interpretation of Tolkien’s connection to the Great War (WWI) was very significant, I think, in impacting the Tolkien biopic that came out a couple of years ago, as well as affecting some of the decisions made in the Hobbit trilogy (in my opinion). https://bookshop.org/books/tolkien-and-the-great-war-the-threshold-of-middle-earth/9780618574810 If you’d like to learn about Tolkien as a young man, and read a thoughtful biographical argument for where his ideas came from and what haunted him forever after the war ended, it’s well worth your time (even if I don’t always agree with Garth -- and I don’t -- in interpreting Tolkien). There’s some other good stuff out there, though -- Rose Zimbardo and Neil Isaacs published an anthology of Tolkien criticism about once a decade for a good long while, and any of those volumes is worth your time.
Lastly, if you want to get a good handle on what Tolkien himself said about what he was doing as an author and a creator, you should read the material in Tree and Leaf -- that book’s not in print any longer, I think, but its contents are in The Tolkien Reader: https://bookshop.org/books/the-tolkien-reader/9780345345066 His essay “On Fairy Stories” is incredibly interesting, and it’s where I got the ideas about “eucatastrophe” that I mentioned in a couple of posts (reinforced by his comments in his letters, I’ll add). And the short story “Leaf by Niggle” I think is as revealing a piece of writing, and as personal, as he ever produced. Definitely worth a read.
I could keep adding examples here forever -- reinterpretations of his work, authors who were influences on Tolkien, authors he influenced, etc. -- but this is more than enough to ask anybody to dive into. If you pick up any of this stuff and want to talk about it, send me a message or drop a comment here -- I’d be delighted! And if you go back to revisit the books or films, please consider all those posts fair game for comments anytime you like. I’ll always read what you have to say, and I’m very likely to respond with reactions and questions, etc. Talking Tolkien is among my very favorite pastimes. :-) Thank you again, one last time, for sticking with me on this long slow trek through the world of The Lord of the Rings -- it’s been a tough stretch of months here in the real world. All paths are now drowned deep in shadow, and it feels as though Valimar is lost to us, as Galadriel once said -- but as she also said, maybe we will find Valimar, in the end. May it be! Namárië.